Published 10:00 pm, Thursday, July 26, 2007

The ancient world was full of warnings about acquiring knowledge. In the Middle East, God banished Adam and Eve for eating wisdom's apple and turned Lot's wife to salt for the sin of looking around. In Greece, Prometheus was chained to a rock for figuring out fire.

Maybe the Old World has a point. What we now know is what we've made, and that knowledge trails us in landfills and in clogged stretches of the high seas, those floating barges of debris as big as Texas, says mariner Charles Moore. While sailing in the Pacific, he saw flotillas made of plastic grocery bags, fragments from fishing nets, foam cups, cigarette butts, fast-food containers, plastic water and soda bottles, rope, six-pack rings, balloons and balloon ribbons.

In a loose re-creation of an installation originally at Santa Monica's Shoshana Wayne Gallery, titled "Always a Pleasure," White collected beach glass, broken ceramic cups, small river stones and possibly the remains of someone's false teeth from a landfill.

By wrapping this rubble in industrial string hung low over a series of small turntables plugged in and spinning, she created an orchestra of found sounds with a series of little bellows hung with stones and knocking against each other, as backup singers.

Of the three sound-art installations currently on view in Seattle -- Bill Fontana's "Objective Sound" at Western Bridge and Sean Duffy's foam-cup chorus at Howard House being the other two -- White's is by far the most visual.

Her strings turn the gallery into a Constructivist instrument, and the weathered wreckage of an old beach dances at the end of them as if it had somewhere to go.

Just as fields of our debris float on the ocean as if they'd grown there, Donovan's work looks as if it grew on its own, rather than having been constructed.

Her exhibit titled "Bubbles, Loops & Spheres" features, most startlingly, a cube made entirely from toothpicks. Big as a hay bale, it's shedding during the course of the exhibit, like a shaggy dog.

In 2003, she made a similar cube out of straight pins. Like it, Donovan's toothpicks offer a close encounter that's immediately disarming.

Ah, yes. Only toothpicks. Yet the weight and geometric mass, the sheer oddity of the project, echoes the mass-marketed oddities in our daily lives, the things that pile up behind us as we attempt to shed them.

Behind the toothpick cube, light blue paper plates conjoined into spherical cells become an elegant form of fungus.

Donovan is best known for spectacular overkill, for massive fields of white plastic cups fused to a foamy sea but still distinctly themselves. They're just cups, after all, but through mass, they become a topography, two identities visible at once.

Also stunning are her plastic straws, millions strong and translucent, the bones of a place that died long ago.

In this show, however, I was most struck by the little things, pale blue drawings made of massed soap bubbles and sticky labels on paper that look like blue burrows seen from high in the sky, hunkered down yet delicate.

Both White and Donovan explore the social character of our interior lives, what we'd like to be if we had a chance to reshape the world again, with all of our species' inventive gusto and none of its poison.